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        <title>Shaped by Values: Language Through the Lens of Culture and Morality.</title>
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    <abstract>Morals and culture are a crucial driver of our behavior and social perception: unsurprisingly, social psychology provides established tools to investigate them in individuals. NLP, on the other hand, has focussed on the interpretation side, with annotations (and models) that, at best, reconstruct the inference an annotator (the reader, in this paper) made of someone else’s (the writer) text, knowing little (or nothing) about the reader, nothing about the writer, and focussing on WEIRD countries. This is a dire resource gap, that we fill with the MCWR dataset, covering Mexican Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic, alongside English (US). An absolute novelty with respect to previous work, we adopt a two-step collection process, covering both generation and annotation, and collect value profiles for writers and readers. This enables us to investigate the impact of value mismatches in the annotation output: we find that readers’ perceptions of writers’ values are strongly shaped by their own values, causing misalignments which in turn raise concerns about generalizations made by models based on reader/writer agnostic data.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Shaped by Values: Language Through the Lens of Culture and Morality.
%A Falk, Neele
%A Jurgens, David
%A Lapesa, Gabriella
%Y Lee, Hung-Yi
%Y Dev, Sunipa
%Y Li, Jessy
%Y Elliott, Desmond
%S Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-459-0
%F falk-etal-2026-shaped
%X Morals and culture are a crucial driver of our behavior and social perception: unsurprisingly, social psychology provides established tools to investigate them in individuals. NLP, on the other hand, has focussed on the interpretation side, with annotations (and models) that, at best, reconstruct the inference an annotator (the reader, in this paper) made of someone else’s (the writer) text, knowing little (or nothing) about the reader, nothing about the writer, and focussing on WEIRD countries. This is a dire resource gap, that we fill with the MCWR dataset, covering Mexican Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic, alongside English (US). An absolute novelty with respect to previous work, we adopt a two-step collection process, covering both generation and annotation, and collect value profiles for writers and readers. This enables us to investigate the impact of value mismatches in the annotation output: we find that readers’ perceptions of writers’ values are strongly shaped by their own values, causing misalignments which in turn raise concerns about generalizations made by models based on reader/writer agnostic data.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1437/
%P 32823-32857

Markdown (Informal)

[Shaped by Values: Language Through the Lens of Culture and Morality.](https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1437/) (Falk et al., EMNLP 2026)

• Shaped by Values: Language Through the Lens of Culture and Morality. (Falk et al., EMNLP 2026)

ACL

• Neele Falk, David Jurgens, and Gabriella Lapesa. 2026. Shaped by Values: Language Through the Lens of Culture and Morality.. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 32823–32857, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.